Saturday, June 20, 2015

Greedy baby-boomers? I'm not so sure

Is there anything less edifying than a debate between
generations about who had it tougher?

Judging by a barely civil clash on TV3’s The Nation recently, probably not.

TV3 lined up three “millennials” – members of Generations X
and Y, born after 1980 – against three baby-boomers.

The younger cohort was out to prove they had been
disadvantaged by political and economic changes over their lifetime. The
boomers, predictably, weren’t having a bar of it.

Great. As if there weren’t enough divisions already in
society, we now have people of my generation and those of my children’s
generation snarling at each other over who got the worse deal.

The catalyst for this clash was a newly published book, Generation Rent, by Wellington
economists Shamubeel and Selena Eaqub. In it, the couple suggest that inflated
property prices mean that in time, only the children of home owners will be
able to afford houses of their own.

The result, they argue, will be the emergence of a new
“landed gentry” that threatens to create a class system similar to that of
Britain.

I’m not sure that the Eaqubs (who are themselves millennials)
are suggesting this was all a deliberate plot to rob their generation of its
inheritance, but Shamubeel Eaqub does say it’s the result of tax and banking
policies introduced while people of my age were in charge. So to that extent
perhaps we’re to blame, even if there was no malevolent intent.

The Eaqubs are not the only ones suggesting the playing
field is tilted against their generation. TVNZ’s Sunday morning political
programme, Q+A, recently interviewed
a New Zealand Rhodes Scholar, Andrew Dean, about his new book Ruth, Roger and Me.

Dean has no doubt where the blame lies for the supposed
burdens heaped on people of his age. As the book title suggests, it’s all due
to the radical economic reforms promoted by Roger Douglas and Ruth Richardson
in the 1980s and 90s.

What people like Dean seem to resent most is the student
loan scheme, which required them to borrow money for tertiary education that
was previously available more or less free of charge.

But as was pointed out on The Nation, the payback for indebted students is that their qualifications
open the way to higher-paid jobs. And Dean omitted to mention that since 2001,
those student loans have been interest-free – which means people like him have
been subsidised by taxpayers like me. (Doubly subsidised, in fact, because
student loans come nowhere near covering the full cost of a tertiary
education).

But all that’s irrelevant, because ultimately there’s little
point in trying to compare one generation’s woes, real or imagined, with
another’s.

The world changes. Nothing is fixed or constant. One age
group might be advantaged in some respects but suffer in others. It’s swings
and roundabouts.

My parents were both intellectually bright but had no prospect of a university education. My
father had to leave school when he was 15. He obtained his engineering qualifications by studying in his own time.

I don’t recall them belly-aching that we were better off
than they were. On the contrary, they were grateful their children were able to
grow up unaffected by war and the Great Depression.

Similarly, my generation shouldn’t resent the fact that our
children are in many ways better off than we were at the same age. That’s
progress and we should welcome it.

But since people like Dean are making an issue of supposed
inter-generational unfairness, perhaps it’s time to point out a few home
truths.

For a start, I would say that the millennials have much
higher expectations than my generation did. They expect to live in bigger,
flasher houses, own better cars and have state-of-the-art home appliances.

They routinely eat out (once a rare treat, reserved for special occasions) and they take
overseas holidays. They enjoy infinitely greater social freedom, having
benefited from reforms – such as homosexual law reform – that their elders
pushed through.

The society they live in is less regulated, less censorious
and more vibrant. They have more choice in how they live.

Financially they’re better off too. The government takes far
less of their income in tax and the interest rates they pay on their mortgages
are a mere fraction of what they were in the 1970s and 80s.

The problem, of course, is that they don’t know this. They
didn’t live through those times so have no grasp of the many ways in which
they’re better off.

Would they swap their 21st century lifestyle for
that of the 1970s if they realised what life was like in a strike-plagued,
inflation-ridden, over-regulated, monochromatic and conformist society? I doubt
it.

I realise I’m starting to sound like the characters in the
famous Monty Python
shoebox-in-the-road sketch who compete to tell the most far-fetched story about
how hard their lives were, but my generation didn’t start this squabble.

Perhaps I can suggest terms for a truce. If people like Dean
stop whinging about being hard done by, people like me might stop banging on
about how his generation has never had it so good.

12 comments:

Paid parental leave, Working for families, free or heavily subsidized early childhood education/care, accommodation supplements, student allowances, hugely liberalized alcohol laws (thinking about civilized developments like being able to take a glass of wine into a movie), dirt cheap music (remember the tax on LP and CDs?) I did an exercise the other day showing my two an LP with a $5.75 sticker purchased when our rent was $22 a week just to convince them how un-hard done by they are when it comes to music.

Digital cameras which cost zip and produce great photographs with all the developing and processing costs, really cheap domestic flights, credit cards, skype, Trade Me, illicit free download of music and movies ...

Well said karl! Not many choices of jobs when I left school at the end of 1959 and when I was first a teacher the salary was barely enough to live on. Lindsay is very conservative in her price of an LP - I have plenty marked at 39/6 which if equated to today's currency is around $50 at least. I used to import some LPs from the UK which meant collecting 5/- UK postal notes -the allowance for these was one per person per day! I recall in the mid 1970's living in a teacher's house between Tokoroa and Taupo-uninsulated with only an open fire and saving $1000 one year only to discover that house prices had risen more than that over the year. I do detect a great deal of bitterness from some young people whose expectations as you rightly point out are hugely greater than ours were. My parents both lacked education-my father didn't go to high school and my mother had two years in the 1920's but they were determined that their children would have better chances than they had and worked towards that. The whole debate is pretty pointless as you say but it seems to be continually bought up by the younger generation who paint us as greedy and grasping.

So is that what life’s about? LPs, cheap alcohol, better food (for some), cars (for some), home appliances, houses and holidays (ditto ditto ditto)? In sum, is life all about money?The privileged now have more choice in how we live, but thousands don't have the choice to live at all. Our ‘infinitely greater social freedom’ means they can be killed before birth, sacrificed on the altar of ‘much higher expectations’. And the consequence of that - as prophesied by our mother in the ‘70s and earning her ridicule - is that soon enough, the elderly, the weak and other infirm will have no real choice either. You say, ‘There’s little point in trying to compare one generation’s woes with another’s.’ But we need to consider whether our children are in fact ‘better off than we were’. Some of my friends and relations -I’m sounding like Peter Rabbit now - agree with me that we were fortunate to have had our children in the ‘monochromatic, conformist’ ‘70s. When people were slim, when they didn’t do drugs like lawyers do now, when they didn’t routinely bung their aged parents into old people’s homes, when they didn’t bump their babies off or suggest they should be able to do the same thing to their parents.Etc etc.‘The world changes,’ you say. Sure thing. Just look at our planet, so damaged by self-indulgence and greed.‘Nothing is fixed or constant,’ you say.God is.

The point was making comparisions that demonstrate the cost of living in the past. In the 1950's, 1960's and even into he 70's many necessities were more expensive-way more expensive-shoes and clothes for instance. To accuse people of 'greed ' is always rather chancy-most people have, thank goodness, an element of self interest which extends to hopefully to their family so that they look after them. To call it greed is to make a judgement call-oh yes, that's where god comes in I suppose.

Women have always "bumped their babies off" whether it was illegal or not.

"Rate of abortion

Because of its illegality, the number of abortions being performed before the 1970s can only be estimated. At the time, estimates were based on numbers of women who were hospitalised after a botched abortion.

From 1927 the Department of Health required hospitals to report the number of women admitted due to septic abortions. In the mid-1930s a department official estimated 10,000 abortions took place each year (compared with around 28,000 live births). Septic abortions were estimated to cause a quarter of New Zealand’s maternal deaths."

Source:http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/abortion/page-1

If those numbers were accurate the rate of abortions to live births was higher than it is today which is around 13,000 abortions compared to 57,000 live births.

I should have spelled it out: ‘They didn’t bump their babies off legally‘.

(Legal abortions are botched too, of course. There’s the teenager who tried to hang herself after being taken out of school for an abortion by the school nurse. She was found in time but still suffers from depression. The abortion rendered her infertile. She’ll never conceive another child.)

Of course abortions were higher in the ‘30s. During the Depression with no money coming in, women were truly desperate.

More to the point, in this brave new world of yours abortions are sanctioned by the state. They’re legal.

Except they’re not legal really, because the law is routinely flouted. Women continue to have abortions on the specious grounds of serious danger to physical and mental health when forty years’ evidence shows abortion causes harm, not healing.

We’ve become acquainted with post-abortion syndrome (symptoms include violence, aggression, sleep and eating disorders, promiscuity, drug and alcohol addictions). We know abortion can have serious physical side effects including cervical incompetence leading to prematurity in subsequent pregnancies, and breast cancer. And research indicates the fetus feels pain at just eight weeks’ gestation.

By now probably one in 3 NZ women has had at least one abortion. We’re all implicated. It’s too awful to talk about. So we distract ourselves with music, holidays, food and booze.

Clearly it's not too awful for you to talk about it. How are we "all implicated"? It is a fact that abortions occur whether they are legal or not. If they are illegal, does that mean we are not "all implicated"? That would seem the status you prefer.

Have you ever been to an abortion clinic? I accompanied someone who I'd rather not have. For her, abortion was just a convenience. But there were women there who were plainly distraught. For whom the decision and following procedure were traumatic.

I respect your position, that human life should be preserved at all cost. That is your highest value. Mine is the (existing) individual's right and freedom to control their own lives.

Well, I’m a loudmouth but even I am careful to choose my audience for this subject. I’m also a bit of a smart-aleck and shouldn’t have talked about bumping babies off, even in this forum. I’m just as passionate about the women who make this decision as I am about their babies.

I meant that in general, abortion’s too awful for people to talk about . Around the table, in the Church and especially in the secular media. It’s verboten. Feelings are too raw.

We’re all implicated because we all know someone who’s had an abortion, and that sad fact means they weren’t supported as they should have been, certainly beforehand and almost certainly afterwards. We’re all implicated also by the fact that abortion is legal and our taxes pay for it and we condone it by our silence.

Many women who’ve had abortions - quite likely including your acquaintance - maintain a state of denial of their emotions which can last for years, with catastrophic consequences for their lives and relationships. Post Abortion Stress Syndrome can be particularly cruel for ‘pro-choice’ women who are taken by surprise as it were, by their reactions, and may get little sympathy from their friends.

I fail to see the ‘cost’ of preserving human life. You can’t put a price on life and the evidence all around us now clearly shows it’s more costly to abort than to give birth.

And I think - if I may say so - that my highest value is love, which means defending the individual’s right to control their own life. Absolutely.

Well, I’m a loudmouth but even I am careful to choose my audience for this subject. I’m also a bit of a smart-aleck and shouldn’t have talked about bumping babies off, even in this forum. I’m just as passionate about the women who make this decision as I am about their babies.

I meant that in general, abortion’s too awful for people to talk about . Around the table, in the Church and especially in the secular media. It’s verboten. Feelings are too raw.

We’re all implicated because we all know someone who’s had an abortion, and that sad fact means they weren’t supported as they should have been, certainly beforehand and almost certainly afterwards. We’re all implicated also by the fact that abortion is legal and our taxes pay for it and we condone it by our silence.

Many women who’ve had abortions - quite likely including your acquaintance - maintain a state of denial of their emotions which can last for years, with catastrophic consequences for their lives and relationships. Post Abortion Stress Syndrome can be particularly cruel for ‘pro-choice’ women who are taken by surprise as it were, by their reactions, and may get little sympathy from their friends.

I fail to see the ‘cost’ of preserving human life. You can’t put a price on life and the evidence all around us now clearly shows it’s more costly to abort than to give birth.

And I think - if I may say so - that my highest value is love, which means defending the individual’s right to control their own life. Absolutely.

About Me

I am a freelance journalist and columnist living in the Wairarapa region of New Zealand. In the presence of Greenies I like to boast that I walk to work each day - I've paced it out and it's about 15 metres. I write about all sorts of stuff: politics, the media, music, wine, films, cycling and anything else that piques my interest - even sport, though I admit I don't have the intuitive understanding of sport that most New Zealand males absorb as if by osmosis. I'm a former musician (bass and guitar) with a lifelong love of music that led me to write my book 'A Road Tour of American Song Titles: From Mendocino to Memphis', published by Bateman NZ in July 2016. I've been in journalism for more than 40 years and like many journalists I know a little bit about a lot of things and probably not enough about anything. I have never won any journalism awards.